Choose Boring Technology (Dan McKinley) — Adding technology to your company comes with a cost. As an abstract statement this is obvious: if we’re already using Ruby, adding Python to the mix doesn’t feel sensible because the resulting complexity would outweigh Python’s marginal utility. But somehow when we’re talking about Python and Scala or MySQL and Redis, people lose their minds, discard all constraints, and start raving about using the best tool for the job.

Sharing our Engineering Ladder — In addition to the ladder causing problems inside of my team, we were having a hard time evaluating candidates during interviews and determining what level to hire them into. Particularly at the more senior levels, it wasn’t clear what the criteria for success really looked like. So, together with my tech leads and engineering managers, we rewrote the ladder to be more specific. It has been very helpful both for the process of reviews and promotion committees as well as for the process of hiring.

Ikea’s flat-pack refugee shelter is entering production (The Verge) — The UNHCR has agreed to buy 10,000 of the shelters, and will begin providing them to refugee families this summer. […] Measuring about 188 square feet, each shelter accommodates five people and includes a rooftop solar panel that powers a built-in lamp and USB outlet. The structure ships just like any other piece of Ikea furniture, with insulated, lightweight polymer panels, pipes, and wires packed into a cardboard box. According to Ikea, it only takes about four hours to assemble.

Visualizing complex relationships in big data often requires involved graphical displays that can be intimidating to users. As the volume and complexity of data collection and storage scale exponentially, creating clear, communicative, and approachable visual representations of that data is an increasing challenge. As a data visualization specialist, I frightened one of my first sets of collaborators when I suggested using this display:

What I had failed to communicate was that we would use a story structure to introduce audiences to the complex layout (you can see how I did it here).

This image captures three emerging limitations in big data visualization:

Five things we learned from the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015.

Last week, I had the opportunity to see the first Software Architecture Conference spring to life after a winter of preparation. Software architects, with or without the official title, swarmed the halls learning from speakers and attendees alike. I count myself among the people who were learning. Many notions about this profession and skill set have become clearer to me and I’m already planning to keep the content coming. I’m also in the early stages of developing out the next Software Architecture Conference (spring 2016).

Within this piece you’ll find my takeaways and lessons learned from the event. I expect these initial impressions to both shape our upcoming exploration of software architecture and be shaped by continued shifts within software architecture.Read more…

Slocum started the conversation with the basics: what, exactly, does a software architect do. Ford noted that there’s not a straightforward answer, but that the role really is a “pastiche” of development, soft skills and negotiation, and solving business domain problems. He acknowledged that the role historically has been negatively perceived as a non-coding, post-useful, ivory tower deep thinker, but noted that has been changing over the past five to 10 years as the role has evolved into real-world problem solving, as opposed to operating in abstractions:

“One of the problems in software, I think, is that you build everything on towers of abstractions, and so it’s very easy to get to the point where all you’re doing is playing with abstractions, and you don’t reify that back to the real world, and I think that’s the danger of this kind of ivory-tower architect. When you start looking at things like continuous delivery and continuous deployment, you have to take those operational concerns into account, and I think that is making the role of architect a lot more relevant now, because they are becoming much more involved in the entire software development ecosystem, not just the front edge of it.”

The O'Reilly Data Show Podcast: Erich Nachbar on testing and deploying open source, distributed computing components.

When I first hear of a new open source project that might help me solve a problem, the first thing I do is ask around to see if any of my friends have tested it. Sometimes, however, the early descriptions sound so promising that I just jump right in and try it myself — and in a few cases, I transition immediately (this was certainly the case for Spark).

Ecosystem of open source big data technologies

When evaluating a new software component, nothing beats testing it against workloads that mimic your own. Nachbar has had the luxury of working in organizations where introducing new components isn’t subject to multiple levels of decision-making. But, as he notes, everything starts with testing things for yourself:

“I have sort of my mini test suite…If it’s a data store, I would just essentially hook it up to something that’s readily available, some feed like a Twitter fire hose, and then just let it be bombarded with data, and by now, it’s my simple benchmark to know what is acceptable and what isn’t for the machine…I think if more people, instead of reading papers and paying people to tell them how good or bad things are, would actually set aside a day and try it, I think they would learn a lot more about the system than just reading about it and theorizing about the system. Read more…

I sat down with Andrew Hinton, an information architect at The Understanding Group and author of the recently released O’Reilly book Understanding Context. Our conversation included a discussion of information architecture’s role in the context of the IoT, the complexities of context, and the well-debated “everyone should learn to code” argument.

Context, information architecture, and experience design

Information architecture (IA) has always been a critical part of creating great products and services, and many would argue that, until now, it hasn’t been given the attention or respect it deserves. The need for thoughtful IA is increasing as we enter the multimodal world of IoT. Whether you call yourself an Information Architect or Designer, you need to care about context. Hinton offers up this hidden motivation for writing Understanding Context:

“I’ll confess, the book is a bit of a Trojan horse to kind of get people to think about information architecture differently than maybe the way they assume they should think about it.”

I followed up with Hinton via email for a bit more on how we need to view IA:

“People tend to assume IA is mainly about arranging objects, the way we arrange cans in a cupboard or books in a library. That’s part of it, but the Internet has made it so that we co-exist in places made of semantic and digital information. So when we create or change the labels, relationships, and rules of those places, we change their environment. Not just on screens, but now outside of screens as well. And, to me, the central challenge of that work is making context understandable.”

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The growing role of software architects: “Architecture has become much more interesting now because it’s become more encompassing," says Neal Ford, software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks.